Power BI dataflows, Premium, and ADLSg2

I received a question today via Twitter, and although I know the information needed to answer it is available online, I don’t believe there’s a single concise answer anywhere[1]. This is the question, along with a brief elaboration following my initial response:

Here’s the short answer: When you use an organizational ADLSg2 account to store dataflow data, your Azure subscription will be billed for any storage and egress based on however Azure billing works[2].

Here’s the longer answer:

Power BI dataflows data counts against the same limits as Power BI datasets. Each Pro license grants 10 GB of storage, and a Premium capacity node includes 100 TB of storage.

Integrating Power BI dataflows with ADLSg2 is notlimited to Power BI Premium.

When you’re using Power BI dataflows in their default configuration, dataflow data is stored to this Power BI storage, and counts against the appropriate quota.

When dataflow data is saved to Power BI storage, it can only be accessed by Power BI – no other services or applications can read the data.

When you configure your dataflows to use an organizational ADLSg2 account, the dataflow data is saved to the Azure resource you specify, and not to the Power BI storage, so it doesn’t count against the Pro or Premium storage quota. This is particularly significant when you’re not using Power BI Premium, as ADLSg2 storage will scale to support any scenario, and not be limited by the 10 GB Pro storage limit.

When dataflow data is saved to ADLSg2, the CDM folders can be accessed by any authorized client via Azure APIs, and by Power BI as dataflow entities. This is particularly valuable for enabling collaboration between analysts and other Power BI users, and data scientists and other data professionals using Azure tools.

Hopefully this will help clear things up. If you have any questions, please let me know!

[1] Please note that I didn’t actually go looking to make sure, because I was feeling lazy and needed an excuse to blog about something vaguely technical.

[2] I add that final qualifier because I am not an authority on Azure or Power BI billing, or on licensing of any sort. For any specific information on licensing or billing, please look elsewhere for expert advice, because you won’t find it here.